Private equity firm Hellman & Friedman is buying Getty Images for $2.4bn. Getty is one of the largest stock image providers online. Its library contains over 70 million pictures and 30,000 hours of film footage.

Under the terms of the sale agreement, Getty’s stock holders will receive $34.00 in cash for each share of stock they own. The $2.4bn price represents roughly a 50% premium over Getty’s market cap.

Getty’s sale definitely proves that the premium stock photo Industry is alive and well.

TidalTV, an online video provider similar to Joost, has raised $15 million. TitalTV’s chairman is Scott Ferber, a co-founder of Advertising.com. Its CEO, Mollie Spilman, was a top sales / marketing executive At advertising.com.

TidalTV’s platform will be web-based but it will also have the ability to be controlled by a remote. The company will focus on premium video content and shows. It will also provide some exclusive content.

The service seems less like an on-demand Internet video provider and more like a traditional television channel provider. I am not too sure if a company like this can succeed. Joost raised a ton of cash and their traction has nearly disappeared.

Divx is pulling the plug on Stage6. According to Divx, Stage6 is being shut down because of high costs. But the main reason for the shutdown is most likely pirated content. Stage6 was full of pirated content. Its pirated content powered many video piracy sites such as Joox and Quick Silver Screen.

Divx launched Stage6 after seeing the success of video sharing sites such as YouTube skyrocket. Their plan with Stage6 was to push and promote the Divx format.

At the moment, there are no high quality alternatives to Stage6. Although a number of video sharing sites currently offer HD content, the ability to download the HD videos does not exist – mainly because the videos are in Flash format.

Google has partnered up with the Cleveland Clinic to enable some of its patients to store their medical history online. The pilot program is most likely a Google Health initiative. Google hinted at launching Google Health roughly 18 months ago. Through the program, Google wants to enable the free flow of medical records between medical institutions.

If you have ever been to multiple doctors, you know how long it can take for medical files to be sent from one doctor to another. Surprisingly enough, a very small percentage of health records are electronic. Most health records are hand-written and placed in vanilla envelopes. When a doctor requests a patient’s records, someone has to find the records, photocopy them, and send them out via snail mail or fax.

Google’s pilot program at the Cleveland Clinic will allow some of its patients to electronically share their medical records with ease. The patients will (supposedly) have control over who can see their records. The health records will be stored in a secured health profile area on Google. Google hopes that the pilot program’s users will see a benefit in sharing  their health records with insurance providers, physicians, pharmacists, and hospitals electronically.

Google is not the first major player trying to cash in on online medical record storage. Microsoft’s HealthVault lets users store and share information about their health online as well.

Although I think the free flow of medical records is an excellent idea, security and privacy could be a huge concern. We may be trusting Google with too much information.

Remember when eBay used to be a pleasant experience? The eBay rush and the excitement of winning an auction is what built eBay into the company it is today. But on the way up the Internet success ladder, eBay, unlike Amazon, forgot about its users. These days, it seems like eBay cares less about its users. Their recent price “decrease” gibberish was an insult to the intelligence of millions of its sellers. Their technical support is a joke. Their site needs a complete overhaul. Their baggage (Skype) needs to be removed. And whats up with not letting sellers give buyers negative feedback anymore? What kind of genius came up with that idea?

eBay’s listings are steadily decreasing. Its sellers are leaving to open their own ecommerce stores. Auction fraud on its listings is rising. Where did eBay go wrong?

I don’t think eBay will be able to fix its problems. It will eventually become Internet history. That company has no idea what its doing anymore. Maybe it should learn a thing or two from Amazon.

The biggest problem with eBay sucking is the small number of alternatives available. All the eBay alternatives I know of suck more than eBay. Someone out there needs to create a new auction platform, raise a few million, and build an eBay killer. I believe its inevitable that a startup will crush eBay’s monopoly.

United Online, parent company of Classmates.com announced that they are withdrawing their IPO for the school reunion-focused social networ.  Currently Classmates.com is facing a lot of competitive pressures (such as MySpace/Facebook/Friendster/Hi5), but is pulling out due to current market conditions.  United Online still plans on eventually having a Classmates.com IPO according to a 10K filing.

United Online has already capitalized $3.6 million in IPO costs by December 31, 2007 and if they don’t have an IPO for Classmates, then these costs will have to be filed as an expense in a future period.  Classmates.com recently restructured to become its own reporting unit.  Currently Classmates has 3.2 million+ paid accounts.

Other United Online properties include MyPoints, Freeservers, Juno, and NetZero.

The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) is makin’ moves online.  In August 2007, the Mickey Mouse and “It’s a small world” creators acquired Club Penguin, a kid-friendly social network for $350 million.  And now the company announced that they will be creating virtual worlds with online games.  As a matter of fact, they hired a team to focus on these specific jobs.  This new team will be part of the Walt Disney Internet Group and will be called Disney Online Studios.

Disney Online Studios will be managed by Steve Parkis.  Parkis studied at Michigan State and Northwestern and then started his career working at Kimberly-Clark.  AFter that, Parkis became a MD at Windhorst New Technologies.  Today Steve serves as the Vice President of Premium Products for Disney Online.

The new Disney Online Studios team will also include Disney Online’s Virtual Reality Studio, Toontown Online, and Pirates of the Caribbean Online.  Disney is also creating a virtual world where kids can control Disney Fairies and characters from the Disney film, Cars.  Club Penguin will continue to report to the Walt Disney Internet Group.

Disney is taking over the market-share for virtual worlds made for children, a market that Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, could have easily done.  Second Life had about 1.3 million users log in around March 2007 [clickz].  I’m not sure what the current number of users are.

[Information Source:  socalTECH]

Kraft Foods (NYSE:KFT), the Northfield, Ill.-based food and beverage company that owns brands like Crystal Light, Chips Ahoy!, Hand-Snacks, Jell-O, Kool-Aid (ohhh yeahhhh!), etc. started their own social network called uPumpItUp.  The site is chaired by pop singer and actress, Mandy Moore.

uPumpItUp’s objective is to help women balance their lives.

“We all struggle with finding time for ourselves between family and friends and work and all those other obligations and we neglect ourselves,” stated Moore.  “Having that sense of balance in life between personal and all that other stuff is kind of essential to leading a happy life,” said Moore.

Registering for the site is easy.  Below is a screen shot:

There are four main features: Express Your Unique Style (fashion), Connect With Others (networking), Get Inspired (health), and Explore Your World (talents/adventure).

Mandy Moore isn’t the first pop star to start her own social network.  Last November, Kylie Minogue started a social network for her fans.

I just dreamed up this random idea on how to make GMail a little bit more fun. Right now the GMail interface is great, but the UI surrounding the site is quite boring. I think it can be jazzed up a little bit by decreasing the size of the message lines and integrating a sidebar on the right to place a mini-YouTube user interface.

This way you can be entertained by YouTube while writing or checking e-mails. The interface should not stop the YouTube player while reading and writing e-mails either. I think this would make the GMail experience more fun.

They did it for Google Talk on the left side-bar, why not integrate YouTube (the 2nd most visited web site in the world according to Alexa)?

What are your thoughts? Poll below.
[poll=5]

Imagine shaking a Magic 8-Ball and asking whether you think you’ll become a multimillionaire by age 15. After the Magic 8-Ball is done being shaken, a icosahedral die side with the word “Yes” appears visibly facing you through the inky water. Are you naïve enough that a Magic 8-Ball can predict your fortune? I’m not. And I do not think any differently about YouNoodle.

Aside with coming up with a bad name for their company Kirill Makharinsky and Bob Goodson made YouNoodle’s interface look too generic for a Web 2.0 company:

I credit the YouNoodle founders for being able to convince Peter Thiel and a few other investors that their company is clearly a good idea. And they were able to land a news article in The New York Times. But then again, so did PowerSet. And look where PowerSet is now.

I’m going to agree with TechCrunch on this one. YouNoodle looks like an inevitable failure.

In one day on YouTube:
* Close to 400,000 views
* 1,800+ comments
* 2,200+ favorites

Superman was one of my childhood heroes. This almost-dunk was absolutely stellar. The NBA is becoming very flashy and is all the more reason for sports social networks to take advantage.  I think Dwight Howard should have done the Soulja Boy dance including the Superman part.

Over the past couple weeks, there have been some interesting changes in the Alexa Top 10 Global sites.

Battle of The Searches With A Little Video Website In Between (1-5)
1.) Yahoo! has retained their #1 position.  They have millions of users chatting away on their Messenger software, watching Yahoo! Videos, listening to Yahoo! Music, and playing Yahoo! Games.  For Google or Microsoft to take away their user loyalty, it’ll be tough.  Microsoft seems this as being an issue, hence the $44.6 billion offer.

2.) YouTube is the most surprising of all.  YouTube surpassed Google, its own parent company.  This is an indication that everyone that uses the Internet all over the world is interested in video content now more than ever.  Google acquiring YouTube for $1.7 billion was such a bargain for the search company.  Considering that Yahoo! is worth $44.6 billion and they are one rank higher than YouTube, YouTube must be worth at least $30 billion today.  Video startups, this is your time.

3.) Live.com.  This ranking was inevitable for them since Microsoft switched a majority of their online services under this domain name.  Hotmail is now Mail.Live.com, MSN Messenger is now Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces is their free blogging platform, etc.

4.) Google dropped by 1.  They are still in the close running against Microsoft and Yahoo!, but YouTube made up for their fall.  Google could easily pass Live.com if they put YouTube under the Google.com domain, but that would just look ugly.  Imagine having a friend sending you an IM that says “Check out this video at http://YouTube.Google.com/watch?v=raGuLfAruNM” instead of “Check out this video at http://youtube.com/watch?v=raGuLfAruNM.”

5.) MSN.com is becoming the personalized arm for Microsoft.  MSN.com, a news portal also includes My.MSN.com, MSN Video.  MSN.com used to be #3, but is losing traction due to its sister-site, Live.com

The Social Networks And The Open Source Encyclopedia (6-10)
6.) MySpace.com is currently the world’s biggest social network and is owned by News Corp.  MySpace was originally an indie site made for musicians to connect with each other and was created by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe.  MySpace is now being used by News Corp. as real estate for advertisements.  News Corp. is also pushing the MySpace brand in major aired events like the Super Bowl.  During the Super Bowl, it was pointed out that advertisements can be watched on MySpace.com/SuperBowlAds

7.) Facebook is the $15 billion valuated social network that is now an exclusive advertisement partner with Microsoft.   Facebook quickly lifted the mat from under MySpace.  In the last 2 years, Facebook started allowing applications and allowed anyone to register for their site, characteristics that were very MySpace and Friendster-like.  But Facebook has grown rapidly on the Alexa top sites and those are a couple of the reasons.  Will Facebook beat MySpace within the next few months?  Very likely.

8.) Hi5 is one of the biggest social networks in Latin America.  The company has 98 million users and was founded by Ramu Yalamanchi in 2002.   Hi5 recently launched a Chinese version of their site and raised $15 million last month.

9.) Wikipedia is the most well-known use of open-source today.  Content on Wikipedia is all provided by its users.  The company was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.  By the end of 2007, Wikipedia had 9.25 million articles written in 253 languages.  Not too shabby for a 7 year old online encyclopedia.

10.) Orkut, another Google property founded by Orkut Büyükkökten is another social network. This is also the most visited web site in Brazil.  I bet if you go to an Internet Cafe in Brazil, at least half the people will visit Orkut at least once or twice, just like if you go to any college campus in America, you’ll see Facebook loaded on many of the screens in the libraries.  As a matter of fact, 55% of all Orkut’s traffic is from Brazil and 17% is from India.

The Alexa Blog is located at: http://awis.blogspot.com/.

Recently Amazon.com placed a job posting on Gamasutra indicating that they will be introducing a new feature for Video Game and Software Downloads.  This feature complements their Unbox service where users can download software, movies, and music right away.  A softawre development engineer position is open with The Software and Video Games Digital Technology Team at Amazon.  This Team is responsible for “digital distribution of software and video game products from the Amazon website, including the newly launched Amazon Software Download store.”

I did a search for PC Games on Amazon and it seems like they have a lot available for purchase.  Being able to download them right away would save consumers time in having to wait for the shipping and handling.  And with all the reviews available for each game on the web site, it helps consumers be able to decide whether certain games are the right fit for them.   More to develop on this story later.

[Information Source: Download Squad]

Techmeme is the most on target site for finding the best aggregated technology news.  Techmeme finds a new stories that becomes instantly popular and attaches related links to that story.  However, when subscribing to Techmeme’s RSS feed, the related links become excluded and only the main headlines make it.  That is up until Techmeme introduced Firehose. 

Firehose accounts for related discussion stories to the main headlines.  This is beneficial for the publishers that get in late, but can be overwhelming for the reader.

Techmeme introduced this feature for all their sites: Techmeme, WeSmirch (celebrity), ballbug (baseball–How about that Roger Clemens?), and memeorandum (political). 

Techmeme also created a Twitter account where top headlines will be added.  The Techmeme Firehose RSS feed is available at: http://www.techmeme.com/firehose.xml.

[Information Source: Somewhat Frank]

Abhishek Surana, Software Engineer at Orkut announced that Orkut now supports 1,000 photos for uploading into albums.  And they made uploading photos in Internet Explorer easier.  Simply click on “New! Upload multiple photos” on the Photo Albums page.  Then you will need to approve Google to install an ActiveX web application.  Click on Add Photos and select all the photos you want to upload from the Explorer window.  Then click upload and the selected photos automatically go into your selected album.

To log into Orkut, Google user IDs work.

Orkut is named after Google employee and Orkut founder, Orkut Büyükkökten.  Orkut is the most visited web site in Brazil.  Users can also add videos to their profile from Google Video and YouTube.  As of August 2007, Orkut claimed to have 67 million users and roughly 45 million communities.