RealNetworks, Inc. (NASDAQ:RNWK) should have saw this coming when they release their new controversial RealDVD software.  While RealPlayer already allows you to download any video from YouTube or powered by Flash, RealDVD allows you to rip DVDs and make back up copies.  RealDVD was officially launched today.  Six major studios announced that they are suing the software company over the software.

These studios believe that many of Netflix and Blockbuster’s customers would just burn the movies that they rent with the RealDVD software, thus causing them to lose out on a great deal of money.  The lawsuit was filed at the U.S. District Court in L.A. 

“The incentive for the consumer is obvious and all but overwhelming,” stated a request by the movie studios.  The request was for a temporary restraining order. “‘Why,’ he or she may ask, ’should I pay $18.50 to purchase a DVD when I can rent it for $3.25 and make a permanent copy?’”

RealNetworks defends their software by saying it is legal.  RealDVD is sold for $30 per consumer at $20 for up to four licenses after that.  The software copy is locked into the original owner’s hard drive and does not alter the encryption technology used by movie studios already.  Copying one’s own personal copies of a DVD is “fair use” by law. 

The movie studios stated that RealDVD violates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to bypass technologies that prevent the copying of a DVD without permission of the copyright owners.  The movie studios that are suing RealNetworks includes Viacom, Inc. (NYSE:VIA)’s Paramount Pictures, Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE)’s Sony Pictures, News Corporation (NYSE:NWS.A)’s 20th Century Fox, General Electric (NYSE:GE)’s Universal, The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) studio, and Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) Warner Bros.

[image credit: About Ning]

Marc Andreesen has joined the eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) board of directors starting immediately.  Marc is also signed up on the board of Facebook and is an investor in Digg, Plazes, Netvibes, Qik, LinkedIn, Revision3, and Twitter.  Marc is also a co-founder of Ning and accumulated most of his wealth from his involvement with the starting of Netscape Communications Corp. 

Netscape was acquired by AOL for $4.2 billion and another one of Marc’s companies (Opsware) sold to H-P for $1.6 billion.  Marc has a lot of experience with growing and selling businesses.  Perhaps he will be able to bring his wealth of knowledge to eBay.

“Marc is a true visionary whose experience will be invaluable to eBay,” stated John Donahoe, president CEO of eBay. “We look forward to learning from Marc’s insights and expertise as we drive further innovation on our platform, invest in growth opportunities and develop technology that will further benefit our customers, build powerful communities and enhance e-commerce.”

Ning currently hosts about 480,000 social networks on it’s platform.  Ning’s current valuation is about $1 billion based on the $104 million venture capital investment. 

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) stock dropped by $200 per share in the last couple of minutes of the market closing today.  The Nasdaq Stock Market operator is currently investigating some of the transactions that might have happened as an error.  “Participants should review their trading activity for potentially erroneous trades and request adjudication,” stated the surveillance arm of the Nasdaq OMX Group.

Bethany Sherman, a spokeswoman of the Nasdaq stated that they are investigating the trades that occurred in the last 3 minutes of the market closing (3:57-4PM E.S.T.).  “We’ll take a look at the trades and make a judgment as to whether there were erroneous trades,” Sherman reported.

Clearly by looking at the highs and the lows, there is a data error with calculating the stock price.  The low is $0.01 and the high is $498.36.  The stock should be back above the $400 mark by the opening of the market again tomorrow.  Those who made the trades at the abnormal prices will most likely be undone.

A few Swedish book publishers have came together because they believe a lot of their books are being pillaged on The Pirate Bay.  The book publishers have stated that about 85% of all of the best selling books in Sweden are on The Pirate Bay.  Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay stated that it’s a bit sad that it’s not 100%.

To find out the statistic of the number of best selling books on The Pirate Bay, the publishers created an illegal specialized code that would scrape The Pirate Bay’s torrent database since there wasn’t another way to find out besides searching for each book manually.  The Pirate Bay owns the copyright to their database of torrents.  And the book publishers violated The Pirate Bay’s Usage Policy. 

Sunde stated that he called up the book publishers to find out more about the code that they implemented to find out the book download statistics so he can send them an invoice.  If they don’t pay up, Sunde plans on taking them to court.  Sunde is also currently planning a new project that may involve the Amazon.com Kindle.

Clearspring Technologies is a widget company that generates revenue through a Widget Ad Network.  The company announced this morning that they have acquired AddThis.  AddThis is a bookmarking button that appears alongside many blog and online news publications.  AddThis also appears on the homepage of Pulse 2.0 at the bottom left where it says “Bookmark.”  AddThis has about 200 million users and 300,000 publishers.  Clearspring aims to become the leading content sharing widget. 

I first wrote about AddThis in October 2006.  AddThis is based in Princeton, New Jersey.  AddThis is also used on sites like TIME Magazine, Oracle, EW, Topix, Lonely Planet, PGA Tour, Tower Records, FOX, ABC, CBS, America Idol, Glamour, and WebMD.  The AddThis button is loaded 20 billion times per month.

Dom Vonarburg is the Founder and CEO of AddThis.  The company officially launched at DEMO 2006. Although the acquisition price is not known, AllThingsD predicts that the amount was for a few million and some form of stock swap.  AddThis’ main competition is ShareTHis and Del.icio.us.  Clearspring makes about $10 million in revenue per year and believes that they can use AddThis for advertising purposes and data analytics.

Clearspring also has about $35 million in funding since they started in 2004.  Investors in Clearspring include Steve Case, and New Enteprise Associates. 

“We’re thrilled to let everyone know that the House bill passed! Thanks to your incredible support we were able to overcome the NAB’s efforts to derail us,” stated Tim Westergren, chief strategy officer at Pandora. “Phone calls rained into the congressional offices over the past 36 hours. Just amazing.”

Tim is referring to the House or Representatives passing the Webcaster Settlement Act.  The Act allows Internet music streaming companies to negotiate royalty rates for playing songs at a rate lower than the price that Congress decided was mandatory last year.  If the legislation doesn’t pass, it might set back Internet music companies like Pandora for months.  The phone calls from the public helped the legislation pass with the House of Representatives.

The National Public Radio (NPR) helped push the legislation through the House too.  The NPR is created and funded by Congress.  And since NPR supports the bill, companies like Pandora benefitted from NPR’s connection to Capitol Hill. 

The National Association of Broadcasters did not like the legislation because they feared that web streaming music companies would be able to make deals first.  SoundExchange, the royalty-collecting arm of the Recording Industry Association of America extended their deadline to negotiate with the NAB until February 15 (from December 15), so a settlement was made.

The only thing that is left for Internet music streaming companies are to push for the legislation through The Senate and reach a royalties agreement with musicians and label companies.

Pandora is expected to reach $25 million in revenue this year.  About $17.5 million is going towards paying royalty fees ($48,000 per day).  Throw in the cost of bandwidth and Pandora doesn’t come out with much profit.  This legislation is huge in order for Pandora to stay in business.

The Senate will be voting on the legislation tomorrow.

Peter Sunde is one of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s leading torrent sharing websites.  Sunde recently wrote in a blog post:

I’m looking for someone who can sponsor me with an Amazon Kindle! It’s not possible to buy the device from Europe and it’s super expensive to use mailing dropboxes in the US.

Do anyone wanna help me out? I’m looking to make an interesting service together with some friends in the New Media Market…

Sunde also linked to a blog post written by Martin J. Thörnkvist.  Thörnkvist ranted about how businesses don’t learn from other businesses.  This includes the music industry not learning from the newspaper industry.  And also includes how the movie industry is not learning from the music industry.  “The printed word is not safe from digitization,” wrote Thörnkvist.

Is The Pirate Bay co-founder working on a new e-book project?  He stated that he’ll tell anyone that sponsors him with a Kindle, including Wired.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) delivered his point-of-view on the direction that he is taking the company.  Ballmer stated that Microsoft is the only that will provide “any real competition” to Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) for search engine market share. 

The best line that was made at the dinner taking place at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley last night was, “We need to do some work to fundamentally reinvent the search business
model,” stated Ballmer. “You don’t brute-force your way into a market. You only make
great strides when you redefine the category for the user.”

Does someone need to remind Ballmer about Internet Explorer’s entrance to the browser market?  Pretty ironic, eh?  I disagree with Ballmer in that line he made. I think it is totally acceptable to brute force your way into a market.  You don’t enter a market and stay quiet about it in order to become a successful business.  If Microsoft didn’t brute force their way into the browser market, who knows whether browsers like Chrome and Firefox will be around.  Those two browsers were released because consumers wanted to see more choice.

Ballmer also mentioned that Microsoft is willing to spend 5-10% of their operating income to become a dominant player in search.  Ballmer was also asked to comment on the current competition with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

“Apple’s a good company, I won’t take anything away from them, but they
have a certain kind of strategy. They believe in putting the hardware
and software together, they don’t believe in letting other people make
it.”  This is why it will be hard for Apple to become a real threat to Microsoft’s operating system.

Glam is an advertising company that focuses on powering the inventory for women-driven content sites.  After acquiring a large German content company called Codex Media, Glam launched Glam Deutschland.  Glam was rumored to be acquiring Codex back in July but it was confirmed recently. 

Glam also plans to launch a new division of their business that will have a focus on the interest of men.  The project is internally known as CodeBlue.  Codex was the owner of Cosmopolitan German and Elle Germany.  The employees of that company will become employees of Glam Deutschland.  Former DoubleClick VP, Ralf Hirt will be leading the Glam Deutschland team [VentureBeat]. 

Glam plans on launching in Japan and France shortly.  While Glam is continuously growing it’s business, they have reduced on employee headcount.  The company laid off 14 out of 200 of their employees (7%).

Glam was started by Raj Narayan, Ernie Cicogna, and Dianna Mullins.  Glam is based in Brisbane, Calif. and raised $115 million in funding.  Glam also penetrated the U.K. market by acquiring a company called Monetise Ltd.

Cramster is social network to make study buddies.  The first step is to identify whether you are a high school student, college student, parent, educator, or subject enthusiast.  Depending on that selection, Cramster will give you a tour of how to utilize the social network for your own needs.  

This past week, Cramster has raised $3 million in Series A.  The funding was led by Shai Reshef [TechCrunch].  Reshef was appointed Chairman of the company too.  Prior to Cramster, Reshef started a company called The Kidum Group, a company that was acquired by Kaplan.

Cramster will be using the funding to expand upon operations and marketing.

Hollywood Media Corporation (NASDAQ:HOLL) has finally ditched their old design.  Their old design looked like it belonged in a time before the dot com bust.  The new Hollywood.com site looks more Web 2.0 styled and has advertising built around it in the same fashion as MySpace.  The homepage wallpaper is the most valuable advertising real estate.

Last month, Hollywood Media sold the domain and the rights to the company’s own Chairman and CEO.  Mitchell Rubenstein, founder of R&S Investments is also the CEO of
Hollywood Media.  He bought the business for $10 million.   Although the ownership changed, Hollywood Media still has the same goals for Hollywood.com.  To become a leading premier portal with a focus on movies and TV. 

The site has seven main categories.  These categories include TV, trailers, movies, celebrities, DVD, and fans.  Hollywood.com is also developing a Facebook widget [paidContent]. 

Hollywood Media is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $75.42 million. Below is a screenshot of the new site:

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) believes it is important that their advertising partnership with Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) should not be misinterpreted.  Google set up a website called YahooGoogleFacts.com to answer FAQs about concerns that people may have regarding the deal.  I embedded the presentation above.

“Some people have questions about our advertising agreement with Yahoo! and there are some misconceptions about it,” stated Karen Wickre of the Google Blog Team.  “So today we are putting facts about the deal on a new website to provide more information on the agreement and why it is good for consumers, advertisers and publishers. We’ll be updating the site regularly, so check back when you have additional questions.”

Some of the main bullet points of the presentation includes:
- A screenshot of how the Yahoo! homepage may look like with Google Ads embedded
- The partnership is similar to the one that Ask.com and Google already have in place
- Yahoo! search today has little or few ads in their inventory compared to Google
- Yahoo! would have the right to use AdSense for Search and AdSense for Content for U.S. and Canada.  Yahoo! can control how much they want to use it
- It is a non-exclusive advertising supplier agreement.  Yahoo! has the right to find other ad partners.
- Yahoo! will allow interoperability between Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk
- People that use Yahoo! won’t see a major change except for seeing more relevant ads
- Advertisers will have new ways to reach more target customers
- The deal is not a merger and does not remove a competitor from the playing field
- This deal does not increase Google’s search traffic
- This deal does not allow Google to control set prices for advertisers
- This deal does not give Google any equity stake in Yahoo
- Similar deals are taking place where Toyota provides Ford with hybrid engine technology and Canon suppliers laser printer engines to HP
- Yahoo! had supplied advertising inventory to Microsoft between 2003-2006 through the acquisition of Overture
- Google’s AdWords program won’t change in any way through this agreement, meaning that the advertiser still bids a price that they think is fair
- The DoJ and FTC have already endorsed similar agreements in the past, meaning non-exclusive commercial deals
- Last slide quotes several publications about the deal

Mixi is one of the biggest social networks in Japan.  They have over 15 million users, but the problem is that most of their users don’t give their real identities.  This is where Facebook’s strength lies because their users are willing to publish a lot of their information and even 15 million photos per day. 

The Associated Press gives an example about an individual of Kae Takahashi.  Takahashi gives publishes pictures on MySpace with the clothes she designs and puts pictures of herself up on the site.  But on Mixi, she doesn’t put her real information anywhere on the site.  On Mixi, she says that she is an 88 year old named Christmas. 

“The vast majority of mixi’s roughly 15 million users don’t reveal anything about themselves,” states Jay Alabaster of the AP. 

YouTube’s Japanese users don’t often put videos of themselves on the site too.  They put more videos of their pets.  On Match.com, most of the Japanese users of the site put their real photos on the site.  Whereas most U.S. users are happy to do so.

(more…)

Social media is playing a huge part in tracking everything that the current presidential hopefuls are doing.  Any tweet that contains the presidential hopefuls names will appear on election.twitter.com.  The tweets are added in real-time.  The real-time tweets are powered by Summize, a company that Twitter acquired for $15 million in July. 

Twitter also partnered with Current TV for election coverage.  Selected tweets will appear on Current TV during coverage of the debates.

“Every second of every day, people all around the world share the answer to a simple question, “What are you doing?” With only 140 characters to work with, folks tend to share the reactions, opinions, and ideas foremost in their thoughts,” stated Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. “This public chorus reveals what is truly on our minds—Election 2008 on Twitter exposes these topics.”

Although it was up in the air this past week whether John McCain would debate or not, but it was announced this morning that he will be.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has released a new project in the Labs called In Quotes.  In quotes is a way to track what the two leading presidential hopefuls have to say about certain topics. 

“While political consistency (or inconsistency) can be funny, as [Jon] Stewart pointed out in a recent episode of the Daily Show, it can also be a serious political matter,” stated Jack Hebert on the Google News Blog.  “With upcoming elections in the United States and Canada, we’ve built a tool that you can use to compare what candidates and other political figures are saying about different issues: we call it ‘In Quotes.’ As you might know, Google News already extracts quotes from news articles. Even so, it was a pretty tedious process to compare what two people were saying about a particular topic.”

Google In Quotes users can type in a certain keyword and then Google will find news articles that quote both of the presidential hopefuls on that keyword.  Some of the hot keywords that are suggested includes abortion, Bush, change, economy, education, election, health care, housing, energy, environment, human rights, immigration, Iran, Iraq, marriage, oil, recession, social security, and taxes.

Since the highlight of today is John McCain’s desire to postpone the debates and suspend his campaign, I did a search on campaign.  Below is a screenshot of what I found.  Click on the image to enlarge it.

This is the most important election of our generation.  I want to make sure that our next President stays consistent with what he says throughout his campaign.  I want to be able to track when one of the hopefuls says that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong” and then a few days later say that the “American economy is in danger.”  It doesn’t matter if it is McCain or Obama, we as voters need to make sure that our future President knows what he is doing.