Yahoo! Inc. is rumored to acquire Maven Networks for over $150 million.  Yahoo! was also previously interested in acquiring Metacafe and previously acquired online video editing company, Jumpcut. 

Maven Networks is an Internet TV advertising platform.  Here is a sample of what they do:
http://www.mediamave.com/foodnetwork/

Maven Networks is based in Boston, Mass. Some of Maven’s clients include FOX, Scipps Networks, Sony, TV Guide, Gannett, Univision, USA Today, CBS, IBM, HGTV, Food Network, and CNET. 

Maven previously raised around $30 million in funding from Prism Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and General Catalyst Partners.  Maven Networks has a partnership with Comcast and had a former advisor that is now the CEO of Brightcove.

[Information Source: NewTeeVee and TechCrunch]

Loomia Inc. put together an application on Facebook that shares the news stories that users have read on certain publications, most notably, The Wall Street Journal.  The application is supposed to display what other friends and groups read the same articles that another user has.  This is a great concept, but the application is still somewhat buggy.

Below is a screen shot of what the application looks like on my Facebook profile page.

In the above screen shot, I have not read any of listed stories, but it still shows up anyway.  Referring to the above screenshot, the application is supposed to show how many friends, groups, and people in my network have read those same stories.  Those links are all broken.  But when you click on “Click to see more popular articles,” a new page will load and the application appears to be running better there.  See below the below screen shot:

I clicked on the groups link for the MySpace related article and found that the article was popular among 4 groups that I’m a part of on Facebook.  So the application is doing something right, but I’d like to see it populate the articles I read so I can show it off in my profile page.  Not have random articles appear.

Other partners involved with the SeenThis? application includes NBC Universal and CNET.  NBC wants to have this app track what users are watching on their site and having the application show the users’ friends what he or she watched.  I think this is a better use of the application especially since the user is opting in. 

EBay Inc., the biggest Internet auction marketplace and parent company of Paypal and Skype, announced today that it is tweaking its feedback system.  EBay’s feedback system is when buyers and sellers give each other testimonials based on how well the transaction went.  The options are Positive, Negative, and Neutral.

Ever since eBay started its operations in 1995, buyers and sellers have been exchanging feedback since Day 1.  This is a huge change for the company.  But starting February 20, sellers will no longer be able to give buyers negative ratings.

The sellers won’t be happy.  This is a loss of bargaining power for them.  

This announcement is coming shortly after eBay CEO, Meg Whitman announced her resignation and that there have been some price fluctuations.

“When the seller leaves a negative feedback for a buyer, it drives them away from the site,” stated Steve Grossberg, President of the Internet Merchants Association. 

As a side note, there are rumors that eBay may consider selling off Skype if the product does not meet certain performance goals this year. 

With so much happening at eBay, they seem vulnerable for other competition to step-up against them.  Google attacked Yahoo! when they were restructuring as did Facebook when Friendster was restructuring.  Amazon just reported a solid quarter so it will be interesting to see how eBay responds.

[Source: Associated Press via Yahoo!]
 

Microsoft announced yesterday that they are the exclusive provider for advertising on The Wall Street Journal web site.  This is a big win for the Redmond, Wash.-based software conglomerate.  Microsoft has similar deals with Digg and Facebook.

Through this deal, Microsoft will also power the ads for Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, AllThingsD.com, and other WSJ-owned online properties. 

“Relevant and targeted digital advertising is important to our business and to the quality of the experience that we deliver to our users,” stated Gordon McLeod, President of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. “Microsoft’s state-of-the-art advertising platform will enable us to dramatically improve our revenues from this key sector, and we look forward to working together.”

Altogether, the websites in The Wall Street Journal Digital Network generate 20 million unique visitors per month.  The Microsoft ads will start appearing in February.

“This deal is a significant win for Microsoft for two key reasons. First, it makes the extended Microsoft advertising network the premier destination for advertisers interested in reaching financially minded users, as it complements our offering in this vertical through MSN Money and other syndication partners,” stated Brian McAndrews, Senior VP of Advertiser and Publisher Solutions at Microsoft. “Second, this deal is a strong indicator that we’re gaining significant traction with our advertising platform. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network is one of the largest financial services publishers in a very dynamic vertical segment, and we’re delighted to add it to our portfolio.”

Microsoft affirmed their position in the digital advertising industry through its acquisition of aQuantive for $6 billion in May 2007.

[Information Source: Microsoft PressPass]

Yahoo!, the number one visited portal with the highest number of users is currently facing new challenges. The company’s stock price is sagging and it is imminent that 1,000 employees will be laid off.

According to the Associated Press, the layoff is the “Sunnyvale-based company’s biggest purge since it was scrambling to survive the dot-com bust seven years ago.” Who is to blame? Google? Terry Semel? Jerry Yang? I would say none of the above.

I’m not a financial expert or anything, but I would say that Yahoo!’s biggest issue is their emphasis on quality. Yahoo! gives all of its users too many quality things for free.

Here are a few examples:
———
Yahoo! Music
Yahoo! Music has two primary features, both of which are free: high-quality music videos and Internet radio. Apple charges $0.99 per video and $0.99 per song. Rhapsody charges a certain fee per month for Internet radio. YouTube is free as well, but the sound and video quality is sacrificed.

Yahoo! Games
Yahoo! allows their millions of users to play games all for free. Many of their games are multiplayer too. Imagine the server costs on this one! Allowing users to play games for free is a quality feature.

Yahoo! Sports
Yahoo! has all sorts of sports fantasy games that it used by millions of users as well. According to Al Pacino’s character in the movie Two For The Money, “You know, networks don’t talk about it. Government can’t tax it. But sports betting is a two hundred billion dollar a year business.”

People all over the world make friendly bets with each other whether its Yahoo! Fantasy Sports or the Final Four NCAA Basketball tournament, why couldn’t Yahoo! somehow make money from this? It’s a quality company and being associated with gambling may be taboo for an Internet company. That didn’t stop PartyPoker though.
———

Yahoo! is losing its search market share to Google, but their quality products keeps all of their users coming back. The company needs to leverage that. When AOL, Friendster, and MySpace realized that their search is not their core competency, they took money from Google to power their search.

This gave the aforementioned companies capital and time to focus on other projects. After all, when it comes to producing quality services for its users, Yahoo! is brilliant. Look at how many services they offer (I couldn’t fit all of the services in one screen shot due to resolution limitations):

Andrew Hogue, Tech Lead at Google announced on the Google Blog recently that the company is testing out different views on search as part of an experiment.  Currently, Google’s current search results view are 10 results in a vertical list. 

There are 3 different views that Google introduced in their experiment: Map View, Timeline View, and Info View. 

The Timeline View shows a clickable timeline at the top of the results that has content relevant for that year.  Below is a screen shot example of the civil rights timeline.  The higher bars indicate that there are a large number of unique dates.  The search box is to search for specific dates.

The higher bars indicate that there are a large number of unique dates.  The search box is to search for specific dates.

The Map View shows a Google Map with results related to search.  For example, I conducted a search of the term “Elian.”  Elián González is the Cuban boy that was rescued by two fishermen and ended up on U.S. soil.  The screen shot shows the cities that are relevant to the case in the events that shortly followed.

And the last new search view is Info View.  Info View simply has a panel at the right side of the page that has options to instantly display Dates, Measurements, Locations, or Images related to the content that is searched. 

For example, if the user search for “cars” and click on images, it will show pictures of cars.  If the user click on Measurements, it will display some common parameters for various cars such as miles per gallon and a search form will appear asking the user to search for a measurements range.  If the user click on Locations, a search form will open asking the user to search for specific locations to find cars on sale. 

Below is a screen shot of the Info View:

Automattic, the company that created Wordpress and was recently funded, announced a new product yesterday called Prologue. The new product can be best described as Twitter for groups. The company said that messages can be sent internally or between groups.

Below is a screen shot from the demo I found on the Wordpress blog:

Some of the messages are from the developers of Automattic discussing what part of the project that they are working on. The whole prologue, the individual authors, all of the tags, combinations, or searches has their own RSS feeds.  Also messages can have their own Gravatar.

Prologues can be public or private and each message can have comments.  Comments also have built-in RSS feeds.  Since Automattic’s developers are so wide-spread, this tool is useful to their company internally.  They set up a password-protected Prologue, which is also available for all other users as well.

The code is open source and is available at: http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/prologue/.  The product is also available for Wordpress.com users under Presentation.

My guess is that if this product takes off, the company may enhance features for Prologue.  For example, creating a mobile version of the product may make sense.  For example, if I am a developer and want to announce to my team that I’ll be traveling so I cannot work on the site for a while, I can easily let them know without being near a computer.

[Information Source: Matt Mullenwag's blog]

SportsClips.TV, known as “the YouTube of sports” started about 2 weeks ago and launched with over 100 Sports Channels.  Users can upload and watch sports-related clips from around the world on the site.

“We are sure that SportsClips.TV will be a huge hit just based on our initial response from high school and even professional athletes that we spoke to.  What’s great is that, besides the user-generated sports clips, we also have sports channels that are owned by SportsClips.TV.  Our owned sports channels contains high quality sports clips of sporting events throughout the world, including video player profiles of the best athletes in the United States, from middle school all the way to the professional level,” stated Vernon Jones, the President of City Sports Media Network.  “This is an incredibly useful tool for the high school athlete in particular.  They can go directly to PlayerProfiles.TV and it will send them to the Player Profiles channel within SportsClips.TV.  College coaches and scouts from every major college will be able to freely peruse the player profiles to see actual highlights and interviews of their potential recruits.  The players and coaches love it because it’s all video and if pictures are worth a thousand words then video is worth a million words.  If you want to read about the players then you can read our newspapers or visit our other sports media websites.”

SportsClips.TV’s plan for revenue is to have sponsored channels and video ads embedded.  The company is also in talks with various media companies to gain sponsorship deals.  Jones also mentioned to Pulse 2.0 that the company would be receiving $2.8 million in funding within the next few weeks.

SportsClips.TV is a subsidiary of City Sports Media Network.  The company is based in Brooklyn.  Competitors of SportsClips.TV include TAKKLE and YourSports.com.

The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s top .torrent sites achieved 1 million torrents as of today. There are 10 million torrent users within the site as well. The Pirate Bay is the largest BitTorrent tracker and the site is constantly flooding with traffic.

Last month, it was reported that the site had double the users and torrents compared to 2007. Brokep, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay stated that the number of users jumped from 8 million users to 10 million users within one month.

The Pirate Bay is constantly upgrading their hardware and switched to a faster open source software program called Opentracker.

HÃ¥kan Roswall is expected to press charges against The Pirate Bay next week. XMule has a complete list of all the civil rights violations regarding The Pirate Bay raid.

[Information Source: TorrentFreak]

“Just wanted to give everyone some insight into some of the changes we’ve been making this week. As we’ve talked about in the past, Digg’s promotional algorithm ensures that the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page. Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page,” wrote Kevin Rose on Digg the Blog.

First you get the Digg credibility, then you get the Digg friends, then you get the Digg power. The Digg Mafia, also known as the top users of Digg that generates 30%-50% of Digg’s front page content, is not amused with the new algorithm. The new algorithm gives the Digg Mafia less power.

And because of this, they wrote an open letter to the Digg team as noted by ValleyWag. Besides the fact that Digg has secret editors and auto-buries, the top users feel that Digg has problems with:
1.) Lack of communication and disregard for the Digg community
2.) Unexplained and unacknowledged banning of top users
3.) Lack of transparency – Digg only shows you the stories that people have dugg, but not the ones that are buried.
4.) The auto-bury list – For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever.
5.) Repeated and flagrant disrespect of its top users

Top Digg users have demonstrated how much power they have had in the past. It will be interesting to see who responds first, Digg management or The Digg Mafia.

Federated Media (FM), the advertisement brokerage arm for many high-end clients has hired Savvian, an investment bank to potentially seek additional investors or to be responsible for incoming offers. There were speculations that Federated Media may be looking for an acquisition, but the company said specifically that the they are not interested in selling. FM’s priority is to focus on growth.

Federated Media publishing partners include GigaOM, TechDirt, BoingBoing, Digg, VentureBeat, and Mashable [full list here]. Federated Media is run by John Battelle, one of the original founders of Wired magazine and also author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.

In total, Federated Media raised over $4.5 million from investors such as JP Morgan, The New York Times, and Omidyar Network. Individual investors include Mitchell Kapor, Tim O’Reilly, Mike Homer, and Andrew Anker.

Some of the transactions that Savvian was involved in includes Dell’s acquisition of Everdream, Motricity’s acquisition of Infospace, News Corp.’s acquisition of Beliefnet, and RevolutionHealth’s acquisition of HealthTalk.

[Information Source: paidContent]

While it is often times difficult to predict which web sites will skyrocket from the bottom of Alexa to the top, I have a hunch that Chickipedia will not have a problem doing so. Considering that many of the top searches are female celebrities and thats all the content that Chickipedia focuses on.

While gaining a good Google PageRank takes at least a good 6 months, wikis that have multiple users constantly editing them tend to have favorable SEO since there is just so much content embedded. And the page titles and hyperlinks having the celebrity names included in them only helps. I think Chickipedia has the potential to become bigger than AskMen.com within a few years. AskMen gets around 7 million unique visitors per month. So Chickipedia has a long way to go, but I’m confident that the open source community will triumph as it did for Wikipedia.

Chickipedia’s homepage shows “the hottest,” “most wanted,” and “the updated.” The navigation is labeled as Categories for occupation of the female celebrities, All Chicks for an A-Z index, Random Chick, and Help. Users can create accounts and “Add New Chick.”

Each profile page for the celebrities include birthdays, hometown, height, hobbies, birthname, nickname, job, hookups, and vices. Then there is a quote from each celebrity. There is also a bust/waist/hip measurement for each celebrity along with a feature that shows what other celebrities have the same measurement. Tagged to each celebrity is other celebrities that have worked with them. Then it is topped off with links to external sites, a mini-bio, “stuff she’s done” like movies and TV, and “Dudes she has worked with.”

Below is a screen shot of Angelina Jolie’s page:

[Information Source: Mashable]

Automattic is the parent company of Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com.  Wordpress.org is an open source blogging platform and Wordpress.com is the blogging community platform.  Automattic has officially received $29.5 million in funding from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Ventures, and the New York Times [source: NYT].

Some Wordpress.org competitors include Blogger and TypePad.  Wordpress.com competitors include Xanga and LiveJournal.   Automattic raised $1.1 million two years ago as well.  Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic stated that the funding would go towards building additional services.

The New York Times Company has been using the Wordpress platform for their subsidiaries for quite some time.  About.com, a New York Times Company subsidiary is based on the Wordpress platform.  And NYT has more than 50 blogs that are powered by Wordpress as well.

Wordpress also recently gave their users on Wordpress.com a major step-up in terms of storage capacity.  Wordpress users only had 50MB up until recently, but now they 3GB each.  Matt Mullenwag, founder of Wordpress hopes that this increase in capacity will encourage their users to prdouce richer media.  Users who have paid for 1GB in the past will get 5GB instead of the free 3GB.

The announcement is also confirmed on Matt Mullenwag’s blog.

“The opportunity is to make it easier for marketers to spend money online,” stated Konrad Feldman, the CEO of Quantcast. “Panel-based research doesn’t work well in a fragmented media.”

Now backed with over $25 million in funding, Quantcast is the only free internet ratings service.  Quantcast can measure widgets and other Flash media to show how often they are viewed everywhere.  The investors in this round of funding include Polaris Venture Partners and Founders Fund.

With this round of funding, Quantcast will be ramping up their services and improve its accuracy.  Essetially, Quantcast is gearing up for taking on the bigger names of rating services like comScore and Nielsen.  Over 20,000 clients use Quantcast including Fox, CBS, Accuweather, and IDG.

Down the road, Quantcast will most likely act as a broker for pairing up target advertisements with web sites that have relevant audiences.  “There are going to be big changes to how the business operates,” added Feldman. “We aren’t going to be talking about GRPs anymore. It’s going to be audience segments. There’s going to be a massive transformation over the next five to 10 years.”

[Information Source: AdWeek]

Netvibes is opening up a new service called Ginger and it recently went in Beta mode.  Netvibes’ Ginger will become the default in the middle of February.  During the time of the transition, it appears that Netvibes’ mobile site is down too.  I tried using http://m.netvibes.com today, but it wasn’t working.

Netvibes has $16 million in funding, but has not set up a real revenue model yet.  But it was revealed today that Tariq Krim, founder of Netvibes is planning on setting up widget ads through micro-banners and text ads.  Netvibes Ginger will have a new interface where a pane will appear from the top to drag RSS feeds and widgets.

There are 110,000+ widgets available on Netvibes.  And Krim wants to make this technology available on other social networks as well.  But…

Interestingly, Facebook and Google both want Netvibes to be exclusive to their technologies.  Facebook as part of their Applications initiative and Google as part of OpenSocial.  Netvibes Universe will also become modifiable for all users.

I believe Netvibes is becoming the standard homepage for almost all publications and online writers.  Netvibes is the epitome of finding information as fast as possible on the Internet.  Once the new interface releases, it will be interesting to see how iGoogle and Pageflakes responds.

[Information Source: TechCrunch]